It is said that to a doctor nothing is shocking and nothing is disgusting. But doctors are, after all, only men of stomach like the rest of us, and it is to be presumed that what nauseates one will nauseate the other. When the starosta unceremoniously threw open the door of the miserable cabin belonging to Vasilli Tula, Paul gave a little gasp. The foul air pouring out of the noisome den was such that it seemed impossible that human lungs could assimilate it. This Vasilli Tula was a notorious drunkard, a discontent, a braggart. The Nihilist propaganda had in the early days of that mistaken mission reached him and unsettled his discontented mind. Misfortune seemed to pursue him. In higher grades of life than his there are men who, like Tula, make a profession of misfortune.

Paul stumbled down two steps. The cottage was dark. The starosta had apparently trodden on a chicken, which screamed shrilly and fluttered about in the dark with that complete abandon which belongs to chickens, sheep, and some women.

"Have you no light?" cried the starosta.

Paul retreated to the top step, where he had a short-lived struggle with a well-grown calf which had been living in the room with the family, and evinced a very creditable desire for fresh air.

"Yes, yes, we have a little petroleum," said a voice. "But we have no matches."

The starosta struck a light.

"I have brought the Moscow doctor to see you."

"The Moscow doctor!" cried several voices. "Sbogom--sbogom! God be with you!"

In the dim light the whole of the floor seemed to get up and shake itself. There were at least seven persons sleeping in the hut. Two of them did not get up. One was dead. The other was dying of cholera.

A heavily built man reached down from the top of the brick stove a cheap tin paraffin lamp, which he handed to the starosta. By the light of this Paul came again into the hut. The floor was filthy, as may be imagined, for beasts and human beings lived here together.

The man--Vasilli Tula--threw himself down on his knees, clawing at Paul's coat with great unwashed hands, whining out a tale of sorrow and misfortune. In a moment they were all on their knees, clinging to him, crying to him for help: Tula himself, a wild-looking Slav of fifty or thereabouts; his wife, haggard, emaciated, horrible to look upon, for she was toothless and almost blind; two women and a loutish boy of sixteen.

Paul pushed his way, not unkindly, toward the corner where the two motionless forms lay half concealed by a mass of ragged sheepskin.

"Here," he said, "this woman is dead. Take her out. When will you learn to be clean? This boy may live--with care. Bring the light closer, little mother. So, it is well. He will live. Come, don't sit crying.

Take all these rags out and burn them. All of you go out. It is a fine night. You are better in the cart-shed than here. Here, you, Tula, go round with the starosta to his store. He will give you clean blankets."

They obeyed him blindly. Tula and one of the young women (his daughters) dragged the dead body, which was that of a very old woman, out into the night. The starosta had retired to the door-way when the lamp was lighted, his courage having failed him. The air was foul with the reek of smoke and filth and infection.

"Come, Vasilli Tula," the village elder said, with suspicious eagerness.

"Come with me, I will give you what the good doctor says. Though you owe me money, and you never try to pay me."

But Tula was kissing and mumbling over the hem of Paul's coat. Paul took no notice of him.

"We are starving, Excellency," the man was saying. "I can get no work. I had to sell my horse in the winter, and I cannot plough my little piece of land. The Government will not help us. The Prince--curse him!--does nothing for us. He lives in Petersburg, where he spends all his money, and has food and wine more than he wants. The Count Stepan Lanovitch used to assist us--God be with him! But he has been sent to Siberia because he helped the peasants. He was like you; he was a great barin, a great noble, and yet he helped the peasants."

Paul turned round sharply and shook the man off.

"Go," he said, "with the starosta and get what I tell you. A great, strong fellow like you has no business on his knees to any man! I will not help you unless you help yourself. You are a lazy good-for-nothing.

Get out!"

He pushed him out of the hut, and kicked after him a few rags of clothing which were lying about on the floor, all filthy and slimy.

"Good God!" muttered he under his breath, in English, "that a place like this should exist beneath the very walls of Osterno!"

From hut to hut he went all through that night on his mission of mercy--without enthusiasm, without high-flown notions respecting mankind, but with the simple sense of duty that was his. These people were his things--his dumb and driven beasts. In his heart there may have existed a grudge against the Almighty for placing him in a position which was not only intensely disagreeable, but also somewhat ridiculous.

For he did not dare to tell his friends of these things. He had spoken of them to no man except Karl Steinmetz, who was in a sense his dependent. English public school and university had instilled into him the intensely British feeling of shame respecting good works. He could take chaff as well as any man, for he was grave by habit, and a grave man receives the most chaff most good-humoredly. But he had a nervous dread of being found out. He had made a sort of religion of suppressing the fact that he was a prince; the holy of holies of this cult was the fact that he was a prince who sought to do good to his neighbor--a prince in whom one might repose trust.

This was not the first time by any number that he had gone down into his own village insisting in a rough-and-ready way on cleanliness and purity.

"The Moscow doctor"--the peasants would say in the kabak over their vodka and their tea--"the Moscow doctor comes in and kicks our beds out of the door. He comes in and throws our furniture into the street But afterward he gives us new beds and new furniture."

It was a joke that always obtained in the kabak. It flavored the vodka, and with that fiery poison served to raise a laugh.

The Moscow doctor was looked upon in Osterno and in many neighboring villages as second only to God. In fact, many of the peasants placed him before their Creator. They were stupid, vodka-soddened, hapless men. The Moscow doctor they could see for themselves. He came in, a very tangible thing of flesh and blood, built on a large and manly scale; he took them by the shoulders and bundled them out of their own houses, kicking their bedding after them. He scolded them, he rated them and abused them. He brought them food and medicine. He understood the diseases which from time to time swept over their villages. No cold was too intense for him to brave should they be in distress. He asked no money, and he gave none. But they lived on his charity, and they were wise enough to know it.

What wonder if these poor wretches loved the man whom they could see and hear above the God who manifested himself to them in no way! The orthodox priests of their villages had no money to spend on their parishioners. On the contrary, they asked for money to keep the churches in repair. What wonder, then, if these poor ignorant, helpless peasants would listen to no priest; for the priest could not explain to them why it was that God sent a four-month-long winter which cut them off from the rest of the world behind impassable barriers of snow; that God sent them droughts in the summer so that there was no crop of rye; that God scourged them with dread and horrible disease!

It is almost impossible for us to realize, in these days of a lamentably cheap press and a cheaper literature, the mental condition of men and women who have no education, no newspaper, no news of the world, no communication with the universe. To them the mystery of the Moscow doctor was as incomprehensible as to us is the Deity. They were so near to the animals that Paul could not succeed in teaching them that disease and death followed on the heels of dirt and neglect. They were too ignorant to reason, too low down the animal scale to comprehend things which some of the dumb animals undoubtedly recognize.

Paul Alexis, half Russian, half English, understood these people very thoroughly. He took advantage of their ignorance, their simplicity, their unfathomable superstition. He governed as no other could have ruled them, by fear and kindness at once. He mastered them by his vitality, the wholesome strength of his nature, his infinite superiority. He avoided the terrible mistake of the Nihilists by treating them as children to whom education must be given little by little instead of throwing down before them a mass of dangerous knowledge which their minds, unaccustomed to such strong food, are incapable of digesting.

A British coldness of blood damped as it were the Russian quixotism which would desire to see result follow upon action--to see the world make quicker progress than its Creator has decreed. With very unsatisfactory material Paul was setting in motion a great rock which will roll down into the ages unconnected with his name, clearing a path through a very thick forest of ignorance and tyranny.

CHAPTER XI

CATRINA

The man who carries a deceit, however innocent, with him through life is apt to be somewhat handicapped in that unfair competition. He is like a ship at sea with a "sprung" mainmast. A side breeze may arise at any moment which throws him all aback and upon his beam-ends. He runs illegitimate risks, which are things much given to dragging at a man's mind, handicapping his thoughts.

Paul suffered in this way. It was a distinct burthen to him to play a double part, although each was innocent enough in itself. At school, and later on at the 'Varsity, he had consistently and steadily suppressed a truth from friend and foe alike--namely, that he was in his own country a prince. No great crime on the face of it; but a constant suppression of a very small truth is as burdensome as any suggestion of falsehood.

It makes one afraid of contemptible foes, and doubtful of the value of one's own friendship.

Paul was a simple-minded man. He was not afraid of the Russian Government. Indeed, he cultivated a fine contempt for that august body.

But he was distinctly afraid of being found out, for that discovery could only mean an incontinent cessation of the good work which rendered his life happy.

The fear of being deprived of this interest in existence should certainly have been lessened, if not quite allayed, by the fact that a greater interest had been brought into his life in the pleasant form of a prospective wife. When he was in London with Etta Sydney Bamborough he did not, however, forget Osterno. He only longed for the time when he could take Etta freely into his confidence and engage her interest in the object of his ambition--namely, to make the huge Osterno estate into that lump of leaven which might in time leaven the whole of the empire.

That a man is capable of sustaining two absorbing interests at once is a matter of every-day illustration. Are we not surrounded by men who do their work well in life, and love their wives well at home, without allowing the one to interfere with the other? That women are capable of the same seems exceedingly probable. But we are a race of sheep who run after each other, guided for the moment by a catchword which will not bear investigation, or an erroneous deduction set in alliterative verse which clings to the mind and sways it. Thus we all think that woman's whole existence is, and is only capable of, love, because a poet, in the trickiness of his trade, once said so.

Now, Paul held a different opinion. He thought that Etta could manage to love him well, as she said she did, and yet take an interest in that which was in reality the object of his life. He intended to take the earliest opportunity of telling her all about the work he was endeavoring to carry out at Osterno, and the knowledge that he was withholding something from her was a constant burden to an upright and honest nature.

"I think," he said one morning to Steinmetz, "that I will write and tell Mrs. Sydney Bamborough all about this place."

"I should not do that," replied Steinmetz with a leisurely promptitude.

They were alone in a great smoking-room of which the walls were hung all round with hunting trophies. Paul was smoking a post-prandial cigar.

Steinmetz reflected gravely over a pipe. They were both reading Russian newspapers--periodicals chiefly remarkable for that which they leave unsaid.

"Why not?" asked Paul.

"On principle. Never tell a woman that which is not interesting enough to magnify into a secret."

Paul turned over his newspaper. He began reading again. Then, suddenly, he looked up.